Fooducopia debuts new restaurant space and a dinner menu. (Provided by Fooducopia.)

Tim Lymberopoulos started Fooducopia about seven years ago as an online organic grocery, and his concept just kept growing — first into a small market and cafe serving breakfast and lunch in the Washington Park neighborhood, and now into an upscale restaurant that serves dinner from chef Richard Glover, who’s already won accolades for his brunch.

“The original idea was to be a little cafe and corner market,” said Lymberopoulos, “but the restaurant side really took off and became the main attraction.”

Telegraph Bistro & Bar in Washington Park just opened for lunch today, will debut its brunch menu on Oct. 24, and its dinner business has been brisk since the eatery opened Friday in the former space of Café Bar and the Grey Cactus.

“It’s been 100 percent people from the neighborhood,” said owner Christopher Sargent. “Everyone we talked to said they used to come to Café Bar all the time, and they love the changes we’ve made. They’re saying the food is really great, so we’re pretty stoked about that.”

Sargent opened the popular Brazen restaurant in the Highland neighborhood last year, and just applied for a liquor license for his third venture, Kindred, that will open in Sunnyside in four to seven months.

The brothers grew up in Colorado, and Kris followed his passion for cooking and graduated from the International Culinary Center in New York City, and then headed to Mexico, where he started his first restaurant, Kinta, in Cozumel.

After Jason joined him in Cozumel, they started a restaurant called Kondesa together.

Dos Santos will be their first restaurant in Denver. The menu will feature dishes like Aguachile, a tropical shrimp salad cured with lime and serrano peppers in a tomatillo-cilantro broth with cucumber and red onion.

Telegraph will open in Wash Park this July. (Photo by Colleen O’Connor)

A new bistro is coming to Wash Park, taking over the space that formerly housed Café Bar and Grey Cactus Cocina. Called Telegraph, it’s owned by Chris Sargent, who owns the popular Brazen restaurant that opened last September.

“I’d always been eyeballing this,” said Sargent, at work on the reconstruction Friday afternoon.

When he moved to Denver about five years ago, he lived in the Country Club neighborhood, and Café Bar was a local eatery. A few months ago, his wife spotted all the closing signs on Grey Cactus and immediately called him to say the space was available.

He immediately got in touch with the landlord, and a contract was signed four days later.

The Peggy Sue scramble makes for an excellent breakfast at Annie’s Cafe in Denver. (Photo by William Porter)

I don’t need much encouragement for a hearty breakfast — it’s by and large my favorite meal of the day — but there’s something about a rainy day and a pewter sky that whets my appetite.

So it was this morning when I slid into a booth at Annie’s Cafe at 3100 E. Colfax Ave., scanning the menu for something new amid the old favorites. And one popped out: The Peggy Sue scramble, a pile of fluffy eggs loaded with sauteed green peppers, tomatoes and black olives, topped with a generous dollop of herbed cream cheese. Hash browns on the side, because that’s how they roll. (Gotta say, I do miss the cheesy scalloped potatoes that were once an option, which were inexplicably removed from the menu some time back.)

So snugged in my booth, I ate my breakfast, read my newspaper, then worked the crossword puzzles as a steady hiss rose from passing tires on the rain-soaked street. Oh, to have gone straight back to bed until the sun came out again.

The vegetarian breakfast burrito with green chile is a knockout dish at The District in Denver. (Photo by William Porter)

On some mornings, the only way to start the day is with a breakfast burrito — especially here in the northermost city of the Southwest.

So it was on a recent Sunday, when my wife and I skipped the typical pleasure of curling up with the newspaper to clean out our garage, which had turned into a Sargasso Sea of, well, the stuff that piles up in garages. There’s a reason we refer to the squat pile of cinderblocks as “the bunker.”

When 9 a.m. rolled around, we were ready for breakfast. But where? In a stroke of genius, my wife suggested The District in the Uptown neighborhood, which I had reviewed in November.

We knew we wanted the restaurant’s trio of house bacons. They rotate, and on this Sunday the offering was the standard peppered pork, a sriracha bacon and one finished with vanilla porter. (A duck version is often on the menu, and it rocks, especially when dipped into the mini-pitcher of smoke-infused, cayenne-spiked maple syrup that comes with the dish.)

But we don’t live by bacon alone, so what else? The vegetarian burrito caught our eye. A few minutes later, bliss arrived: A fat-boy spinach tortilla packed with scrambled eggs, home fries, tomato, spinach, onions, peppers, and cheddar cheese, smothered in veggie green chili.Read more…

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An open-faced red bean omelet is featured at Leenie’s Cafe in Longmont. (Photo by William Porter)

OK, the Denver Breakfast Club is usually confined to the Mile High City, but today we are wandering afield: specifically, to Leenie’s Cafe, which sits at 800 S. Hover Road in Longmont.

It’s a sunny, family-friend mom-and-pop place that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. The breakfast-and-lunch menu has a Louisiana slant. Sure you can get corned beef hash and huevos rancheros, but you can also chow down on trout St. Charles with poached eggs, fried oyster omelets with remoulade sauce, plus pain perdu, the classic “lost bread” start to the day.

A recent morning found me needing breakfast in Longmont before trekking to Denver, and I stopped in. The menu item that leapt out at me? An open-faced omelet smothered with red beans and a Louisiana-style chorizo, which meant the sausage resembled andouille, plus jack cheese. Somewhat unaccountably, it was adorned with tortilla chips.Read more…

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Well here’s something worth toasting: Max’s Wine Dive is opening in Denver’s Governor’s Park neighborhood. The spot at 696 Sherman St. sits in a former dry-cleaning operation just north of Racine’s. Doors open April 14 at 4 p.m.

Beyond vino, the focus is on gourmet comfort food — the restaurant’s mantra is “Fried chicken and champagne? Why the hell not?”

Colorado native Shane Way is in charge of the menu. Along with that fried chicken, he’ll be offering Spicy Drunken noodles with baby bok choy, baby corn, sambal and Thai basil with rice chips, and a garden salad with grilled asparagus, watercress, pea shoots and a lemon-dill house ricotta, among other goodies. Vindaloo-style lamb curry with Carolina Gold rice and grilled naan will also be featured.Read more…

A Peeps diorama of the Red Hot Chili Peepers was one of the stars at Racine’s Peeps Show. (Photo by William Porter)

This is the first year since 2008 that The Denver Post didn’t sponsor its Eastertime Peeps contest, where readers created offbeat dioramas featuring the marshmallow figures. The contest was overseen by former Food editor Kristen Browning-Blas, who departed last July for a position at Colorado State University.

Lucky us, Racine’s restaurant at 650 Sherman St. rode to the rescue with its own “Peeps show,” which was set up between the host stand and the bar.

There were several cute and clever dioramas, but the one that made us grin on a weekend visit was the Red Hot Chili Peepers, a tribute to the longstanding rock-funk band. A ton of clever stuff was going on, and other candy besides Peeps got into the act: The guitar bodies were made of mini-Hersey and Krackel bars, while a Pez dispenser served as a mic stand.